The president’s request for the authorization to use military force against the Islamic State has landed in a Congress as divided as the country.

That division was mirrored in the disparate receptions Obama’s resolution received from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

To the Times, Obama’s AUMF is “alarmingly broad. It does not limit the battlefield to Syria and Iraq.”

Moreover, Obama “seeks permission to attack ‘associated persons or forces.'” This would give the White House “virtually unrestricted power to engage in attacks around the globe as long as it can justify a connection, however tenuous, to the Islamic State.”

To the Journal, Obama’s resolution ties America down the way the Lilliputians tied down Gulliver. It authorizes war on ISIS for only three years. It would prevent another U.S. army from being sent to Iraq or Syria.

“Rather than put shackles on his generals,” says the Journal, “Mr. Obama should be urging them to mount a campaign to roll back ISIS as rapidly as possible from the territory it holds.”

But the country seems nowhere near this hawkish.

Viewing nightly on cable news the hardships endured by the Wounded Warriors of our two latest and longest wars has cooled the arbor for new crusades.

About the character of the Islamic State, there is no disagreement.

“A brutal, vicious death cult,” Obama called it.

But about whether ISIS is an “existential threat” to us, or if this war is really our war, there is no agreement.

North of Syria, along 500 miles of border, sits a Turkish army of half a million with 3,000 tanks that could cross over and annihilate ISIS in a month. Former Secretary of State James Baker suggests that the U.S. offer air, logistics and intelligence support, if the Turks will go in and snuff out ISIS.

But not only have the Turks not done so, for a time they looked the other way as jihadists crossed their border to join ISIS.

If the Islamic State, as Ankara’s inaction testifies, is not viewed as a threat to Turkey’s vital interests, how at to ours?

There are reports that the Saudis and the Gulf Arabs would be more willing to participate in a war on ISIS if we would first effect the ouster of Bashar al Assad.

Everyone in the Middle East, it appears, wants the United States to fight their wars for them.

But as they look out for their interests first, it is time we started looking out for ours first.

Foremost among those interests would be to avoid another $1 trillion war, with thousands of U.S. dead and tens of thousands of wounded, and a situation, after a decade of fighting, as exists today in Afghanistan and Iraq, where those we leave behind in power cannot hold their own against the enemies we defeated for them.

That an Iraqi army we equipped and trained at a cost of tens of billions would disintegrate and desert Iraq’s second city, Mosul, when confronted by a few thousand fanatics, was a debacle.

Why should Americans have to recapture Mosul for Baghdad?

And why do these “democrats” we install in power seem to perform so poorly?

Under Saddam, Iraq fought an eight-year war against a nation three times as large and populous, Iran. Yet, Saddam’s army did not run away as the Iraqi army we trained and equipped ran away from Anbar.

What did Saddam Hussein have to motivate men that we do not?

What is it that makes some people in the Middle East volunteer and fight to the death, while others refuse to fight or run away from battle?

For, as the Journal writes, “The Associated Press reported Tuesday that U.S. intelligence officials now say foreign fighters are joining Islamic State ‘in unprecedented numbers,’ including 3,400 from western nations out of 20,000 from around the world.”

Why is this?

The Islamic State has plugged into the most powerful currents of the Middle East. It is anti-American, anti-Zionist, anti-West, Islamic and militantly Islamist. It promises to overthrow the old order of Sykes-Picot, to tear up the artificial borders the West imposed on the Arabs, and to produce a new unity, a new dispensation where the Quran is law and Allah rules and all Sunnis are united in one home whence all infidels — Jews, Shia, Christians — have been driven out. Hateful as it is, ISIS has a vision.

Every nation in the world should fight ISIS the are a symbol of the worst of human nature. The fact they a attracting recruits from all over the world means that they are everyone's problem not just those countries in the middle east.

_________________“Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking...” Leo Tolstoy

OK, let's go along that path for a moment. The battle against ISIS is being supported by the US, and to a limited extent, by Canada.

PM Harper stated in an address to the Israeli Knesset on his last visit -"Ladies and gentlemen, Canada and Israel are the greatest of friends, and the most natural of allies."

During Israeli PM Netanyahu's speech to the US Congress this week he stated at least six or eight times that Israel is America's "greatest/oldest/truest/best" ally.

Now I've always thought that an 'ally' nation is one that comes to aid when one is involved in a war, and helps with the fighting. Can any of you tell me which of America's wars that Israel helped fight?

Now let's talk for a minute about the current fight to retake the Iraq cities of Mosul and Tikrit from ISIS. Tell me, if you will, which Middle-East nation is helping the Iraqi and Kurdish forces with this effort.

In the past, The Gulf War comes to mind, the Israelis were specifically asked to stay out of the fight because of middle-east anti-Israel sentiments. The concern was that if Israel was seen to attack an Arab country it could result in a joining of Arab countries in a united attack on Israel. Israel actually was attacked by Iraq in a desperate effort to complicate the conflict and turn the focus on Israel rather than the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq.

As the only democracy in the Middle-East that was established by the United Nations, including Canada and the USA, why wouldn't we support Israel. We helped create Israel now are you suggesting that after almost 70 years we should abandon them and watch the genocide that would occur? We can debate all we want whether or not it was the right thing to do to confiscate Palestinian land to create the state of Israel but the reality is that it happened and 70 years later you don't abandon the people of Israel. I think the jewish people have suffered enough.

I am beginning to suspect that what the 'West' is calling ISIS is not what it appears to be. There's more here than Western governments and media are telling us.

ISIS’s series of atrocities, in the form of carefully crafted, emotionally impactful execution videos (real or faked) cannot possibly be the work of rational actors seeking a military victory.

The videos only ever work to ISIS’s disadvantage, solidifying the resolve of their current ‘coalition’ opponents as well as creating new enemies with every release.

Sixty-two countries and groups are presently fighting in the dubious ‘coalition’ against ISIS, most of which have modern militaries with advanced air and ground forces. Why in the world would a 'real' ISIS continue to entice more countries to join the already over-crowded alliance against them?

Why a group that purports to want to establish a ‘state’ which will govern millions of people is deliberately seeking more and more enemies and a constant state of war with them is beyond belief.

A more likely scenario

The de-stabilization of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Egypt and other Middle Eastern and North African states is a long-standing Zionist policy plan dating back more than 40 years.

In 1982 an Israeli strategy paper authored by Oded Yinon, a prominent member of the Israeli Likud Party, was published.

Called “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s”, it was a plan to de-stabilize all of Israel’s military rivals.

Yinon envisioned a new Middle East made up of fractured and fragmented Arab/Muslim countries divided into multiple polities along ethnic and religious lines. He suggests a way to accomplish by instigating civil strife in the Arab/Muslim countries which will eventually lead to their dismemberment.

In the document, Yinon specifically recommended:-Lebanon’s total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon, so that there will be a Shi’ite Alawi state along its coast, a Sunni state in the Aleppo area, another Sunni state in Damascus hostile to its northern neighbor, and the Druzes who will set up a state, maybe even in our Golan, and certainly in the Hauran and in northern Jordan. This state of affairs will be the guarantee for peace and security in the area in the long run, and that aim is already within our reach today.

He later singled out Iraq as Israel’s most formidable enemy at the time, and outlined its downfall in these terms:-

Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi’ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north. It is possible that the present Iranian-Iraqi confrontation will deepen this polarization.

Of course Israel would want to destabilize the military of the countries that are a threat to them. It's called self preservation. To suggest however that ISIS is an Israeli invention is too far out there for me.

........... To suggest however that ISIS is an Israeli invention is too far out there for me.

OK, perhaps not 'literally speaking', but let's examine some of the 'pre-conditions' to the advent of ISIS. We'll take it one step at a time and get to Israel's involvement in due course. ISIS is a direct outcome of US/Western 'meddling' in the region.

William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, and Rogue State: a guide to the World’s Only Super Power. His latest book is: America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy. He can be reached at: BBlum6@aol.com

Ed

The War on Terrorism … or Whateverby WILLIAM BLUM

“U.S. hopes of winning more influence over Syria’s divided rebel movement faded Wednesday after 11 of the biggest armed factions repudiated the Western-backed political opposition coalition and announced the formation of an alliance dedicated to creating an Islamist state. The al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, designated a terrorist organization by the United States, is the lead signatory of the new group.”

– Washington Post, September 26, 2013

Pity the poor American who wants to be a good citizen, wants to understand the world and his country’s role in it, wants to believe in the War on Terrorism, wants to believe that his government seeks to do good … What is he to make of all this?

For about two years, his dear American government has been supporting the same anti-government side as the jihadists in the Syrian civil war; not total, all-out support, but enough military hardware, logistics support, intelligence information, international political, diplomatic and propaganda assistance (including the crucial alleged-chemical-weapons story), to keep the jihadists in the ball game. Washington and its main Mideast allies in the conflict – Turkey, Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia – have not impeded the movement to Syria of jihadists coming to join the rebels, recruited from the ranks of Sunni extremist veterans of the wars in Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, while Qatar and the Saudis have supplied the rebels with weapons, most likely bought in large measure from the United States, as well as lots of of what they have lots of – money.

This widespread international support has been provided despite the many atrocities carried out by the jihadists – truck and car suicide bombings (with numerous civilian casualties), planting roadside bombs à la Iraq, gruesome massacres of Christians and Kurds, grotesque beheadings and other dissections of victims’ bodies (most charming of all: a Youtube video of a rebel leader cutting out an organ from the chest of a victim and biting into it as it drips with blood). All this barbarity piled on top of a greater absurdity – these Western-backed, anti-government forces are often engaged in battle with other Western-backed, anti-government forces, non-jihadist.

It has become increasingly difficult to sell this war to the American public as one of pro-democracy “moderates” locked in a good-guy-versus-bad-guy struggle with an evil dictator, although in actuality the United States has fought on the same side as al Qaeda on repeated occasions before Syria. Here’s a brief survey:- http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/08/ ... -whatever/